Similarly, in the Hebrew Bible, the warrior-king David mourns the death of Jonathan -- his close friend.
Now, as Brooks operationally defines it, heroic myth includes superhero movies, video games, and competitive sporting events. He says, "Sport is living myth. Like video games and superhero movies, it gives the way myth gives. It gives people a sense of the heroic."
The biblical story of Moses is a hero story. In terms of American popular culture, Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 movie The Ten Commandments is a hero story, starring Charlton Heston. We need hero stories.
In terms of American popular culture, Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a hero story, as is the 1963 movie starring Gregory Peck. We need hero stories.
Brooks even mentions Wonder Woman as a hero story. Yes, the comic book, the television series, and the movies based on Wonder Woman are hero stories. We need hero stories.
In real life, in distinction from hero stories, we need to have heroes in our lives -- even if in real-life some of our heroes come to disappoint us.
Both hero stories and real-life personal heroes in our lives enable us to activate what the Athens-based philosophers Plato and Aristotle refer to in their writings as the thumos (or thymos) part of our human psyches. I am transliterating the Greek word. It is translated into English as the spirited part of the psyche. In today's parlance, it involves the fight v. flight v. freeze response.
I am not an expert in psychiatric terminology. But clinical depression appears to me to involve the serious collapse of the thumos (or thymos) part of the human psyche. Such a collapse can be dangerous for the person experiencing it -- it can lead the person to commit suicide.
For a recent discussion of suicide, see Edward Curtin's OEN article "Slow Suicide and the Abandonment of the World" (dated June 23, 2018):
Now, even the Athens-based philosophers Plato and Aristotle understood that the thumos (or thymos) part of the psyche required careful cultivation by the virtue of courage, which they defined as the mean between brashness and cowardice. Trump exemplifies brashness -- not courage.
Athens was named after the goddess Athena -- the goddess of wisdom and of victory in war (Athena Nike -- you know, like the Nike shoes). In one of the most powerful scenes in the Homeric epic the Iliad, Athena forcibly restrains King Achilles from brashness -- by forcibly pulling him back from dispatching the disrespectful King Agamemnon. She tells Achilles to give Agamemnon a tongue-lashing instead, which Achilles does.
We need hero stories to supply us with examples of courage. We need warrior-king stories to supply us with examples of how good kings behave, as distinct from tyrants. In addition, we need hero stories about women warriors and women warrior-queens.
However, tyrants represent only one extreme -- the extreme of brashness. The other extreme is cowardice. From the standpoint of a brash fellow like Trump, even the mean-between-the-extremes (what Plato and Aristotle refer to as the virtue of courage) appears to be weakness.
But let us be clear here. Parents are the archetypal Queen and King figures in their children's lives. Both mothers and fathers can be tyrants in their children's lives. Consequently, when our parents (one or both) are tyrants in our lives, then we tend to hunger for a Queen or King figure in our lives that we can have a close relationship with.
Conversely, at the other extreme, both mothers and fathers can be weak Queen and King figures in their children's lives. Consequently, when our parents are weak Queen or King figures in our lives, we tend to hunger for a Queen or King figure that we can have a close relationship with.
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